


i wish i dreamt in the shape of your mouth

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captivity, Delirium, Dissociation, Fever, Fever Dreams, Flashbacks, Hallucinations, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Torture, Isolation, M/M, Mental Instability, Pneumonia, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Protective Steve Rogers, Sick Bucky Barnes, Sickfic, Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:14:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27061018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: “Hey, you.” He said to the shadow, because it's Steve. Of course it was. “I’m frozen,” Bucky smiled, breathing a rattled laugh that came out as a choke against the concrete, because suddenly paralysis and unattainable oxygen was the funniest thing in all of existence.Or Bucky’s got pneumonia in Austria, and fever-dream!Steve – who paints the moon and rainbows and starry skies – is there to help.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	i wish i dreamt in the shape of your mouth

**Author's Note:**

> this was written with the help of the whumptober discord’s sprint challenge and has only reinforced that i am a very slow writer lol.
> 
> whumptober prompt day 13: breathe in breathe out, delayed drowning, chemical pneumonia.
> 
> not really proofread btw.
> 
> title from ‘american beauty/american psycho’ - fall out boy.

Bucky couldn’t see the moon from where he lay on the concrete, lungs filled and heavy, but he imagined it reigning high above the Earth tonight. Almost like a fever dream stealing away his sane lucidity, he imagined the moonlight pouring down onto his feeble form like soothing waves of celestial starlight, drowning away the dark abyss of nothingness that was his cell in these lifeless 3AMs where nothing felt real. His mind was unraveling, becoming undone like smithereens of stardust falling from the sky.

The moon’s glow was animated, he decided, moving like pastel watercolours in ripples down upon the Earth like a merciful goddess weeping sunlight onto her world during the most benevolent of icy winters. 

The moon was something grand, in its own angelic, unearthly way – so distant, so disconnected to the sins of the Earth, and that was something beautiful. If Bucky could force his aching limbs to move, his lungs to inhale the oxygen enough for him to breathe freely again, he would sit himself up, look out beyond the rusted, tainted barred windows and stare at it for the rest of the endless night, and breathe in its glow as if to replace the oxygen that festered and smithered weakly inside his airways, refusing to circulate.

His lips were a bruised blush of cyan and dull purple, currently pressed to the filthy cement as if it were that of rapture rather than pain, and he distantly remembered from a less gravitated, abstract part of his mind that Steve had painted the moon before he’d left.

In a time where reality smelled of morning frost and charcoal and burning candle wax filling the apartment with honey, rather than a rotting cell where the floor tasted of metallic iron and mouldy infections, Bucky had sat against the stained window of their Brooklyn apartment with pink lips and air in lungs, facing toward the sky of a thousand stars, and Steve drew him and the moon.

_“Why am I rainbow?”_ Bucky had laughed, looking at the final piece from over Steve’s bony shoulders from where the canvas lay in his lap. The drawn figure of Bucky was contorted in a highlighted glow of multicolored prism light from where the moonlight struck his frame, all while the rest of the scenery was completely monochrome, colours. Despite its dull hue, the moon was most prominent, much brighter and larger than it had seemed when Bucky bore witness to it from his windowsill, but it was nonetheless a masterpiece. Steve made beautiful things from the wreckage of uglier realities, Bucky had always thought. He could make cascading constellated stars in the sky seem like celestial heaven if they were to be raining down Armageddon, and those were the kind of things Bucky ached for within his paralytic limbo of intangible moons and the inability to breathe air. 

He missed the rainbow of pastel vermilions and baby blues and lilacs the painting had engulfed him with; he missed the shine of the moon bearing down onto his very earthy, very human being, and missed Steve in the same way he did oxygen.

_“Because,”_ Steve had said with the audacity to shrug and smirk the corners of his lips up as he pressed them to Bucky’s, as if that was the only explanation for why Steve saw Bucky the way he did with his beautiful mind that illustrated the world in colour as if he were its medicine.

“Show me the moon,” Bucky mumbled, face bloodless and pale and shivering with the warmth of a rising fever, and Steve’s intangible, phantom, bird-bone fingers laced through hair as if he were painting Bucky back together the same way he could with graphite sketches on paper. 

“You have to sit up, Buck,” Steve told him, fading into Bucky’s sense of reality like their broken vinyl that vanished music in and out as the tune played throughout their home. His lungs felt tired, underneath layers and layers of oceanic waters as he breathed in the stale, cold cell, and somewhere above the hurt, Bucky thought sitting up sounded about right.

“Hey, you.” He said to the shadow, because it’s Steve. Of course it is. It always is. “I’m frozen,” Bucky smiled, breathing a rattled laugh that came out as a choke against the concrete, because suddenly paralysis and unattainable oxygen was the funniest thing in all of existence. He was a soldier, captured by the enemy and now a prisoner of war where no one was ever coming back from him, yet unmoving from the ground where he lay on his imploded, suffocating chest was what was killing him. 

“You’re not. You’re just a person who’s never had the privilege of contracting pneumonia on a regular basis,” Steve said, not unkindly in the way he perhaps should have sounded. Bucky found his voice soothing, enough to drift off to it into a sweeter world that wasn’t so cold or concrete, he supposed.

_Pneumonia, huh?_

“Yes, _pneumonia_ ,” Steve repeated, though Bucky didn’t recall ever speaking aloud. In fact, he was quite comfortable laying here and pretending the cement was cotton, facading that the mould growing in infectious colonies beside the flesh of his cheek was his own twisted design of starry skies that he couldn’t view from the ground. “You have to sit up, you’ll breathe better.”

Tempting though it was, Bucky didn’t have much choice in the matter. Steve’s tiny, small pale hands shifted his aching shoulders, raised his head from the concrete as it dipped forward with undeniable fogginess. “Mmh, no,” Bucky protested feeling nauseous and heavy and deoxygenated, a little like he was drowning by the fault of his own lungs, and despite Steve’s attempt to be his savior, rapture was not Bucky’s destiny – instead he was condemned to lie here on the hardening ground of an isolated cell, blinded towards anyone and anything but the suffocating darkness.

“Buck, please. You’re not breathing.” Steve said, sounding the way Steve would sound, but the words were wrong and nothing made sense in his airless delirium and drowned lungs of mucus and water. For someone drowning, the world was awfully floaty, as if he were slipping away into a place more permanent, more solid – the kind of place someone didn’t come back from. 

_Huh_ , Bucky thought and then didn’t. Maybe this would convince Steve to stay far, far away from the war, and therefore shelter himself from the horrors Bucky wouldn’t be able to protect him from.

“You’re one to talk,” Bucky rasped, as a kaleidoscope of memories assaulted his mind like mirrors of rainbow light within a mosaic. Steve was the centre of each fragmented piece, existing as a focal point that Bucky could almost touch as the glassy, phantom collage spun in front of his eyes. 

In the world of constantly moving images, it was Steve whose bloodless skin felt as icy as the snow outside in the street, lips and fingers tinged with pastel blues and lilac purples. He lay still, silent on the old couch cushions above the floorboards and Bucky sat beside him with a bowl of chicken broth, a candlelight and stolen cough medicine. He would press his pink, soft lips to Steve in a gentle breath, and breathe oxygen to the one he loved as if it worked that way. They liked to pretend, facade what was reality until things built themselves better, and that was okay, Bucky had learned.

“I’ll show you the moon,” Steve said, a sense of finality solidifying within his calming voice, retaking Bucky’s unmoving form in his small hands, and this time, Bucky decided to let him. 

He pulled himself up into Steve’s lap, letting Steve run his hands over Bucky’s chest, matching their breaths so their lungs synchronized and it didn’t feel like drowning so much anymore as it did peacefully dying.

“You’re not dying,” Steve told him, and Bucky should perhaps really question why Steve was here, why he could listen to every thought Bucky had before he could even choke the words out, but tonight he belonged to the concrete, to the stale atmosphere and the abyss of a moonless night. 

“I know. You’re here.” Bucky breathed, basking in the fevered coolness before the dawn and Steve’s intangible serenity beside him, anchoring him in the same way the moon had despite it seeming galaxies and galaxies away from Bucky’s cell, here in the gallows of the Earth where (almost) nothing would ever find him.

Steve was the exception, he knew as he fell asleep against the wall, gazing distantly beyond the window towards the night’s sky with the ghostly colour of white shining down upon his bloodless flesh from the intangible watercolour moon’s glow, smothering out the nothingness.


End file.
